OceanGate's former finance director said she quit when Stockton Rush asked her to be the Titanic submersible's chief pilot after firing the original one for raising safety issues: report

• A former OceanGate finance director said Stockton Rush asked her to be the head pilot for the Titan.
• She told The New Yorker that she quit when the OceanGate CEO urged her to replace the former pilot.

A former director of finance and administration for OceanGate said the company's CEO, Stockton Rush, asked her in 2018 to become the chief pilot for the Titan submersible — a suggestion that led to her quitting her job.

The former director — who was not named — talked to The New Yorker's Ben Taub about her encounter with Rush.

Rush asked her about becoming the submersible's head pilot after firing David Lochridge, the submarine pilot originally billed for the role, she told Taub.

Lochridge was initially sued by OceanGate in 2018, but he countersued the organization and alleged that he was fired after raising key concerns about the Titan's hull. In his report, Taub also detailed conversations between Lochridge and other submersible experts who raised concerns about the Titan's safety in exchanges with Rush.

Soon after Lochridge was fired, Rush asked the finance director to fill in for the pilot, she told Taub.

"It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting," she told the New Yorker.

She said she "did not trust" Rush because Lochridge was no longer working at OceanGate and quit her job as soon as she found a new role elsewhere, Taub reported.

The former director added that some of OceanGate's engineers were teenagers when they worked for the company, while others were in their early twenties, the New Yorker reported. Some of the engineers were also paid $15 per hour at one point, the former director told Taub.

The Titan imploded on June 18 while carrying five people — including Rush — to the wreck of the Titanic some 13,000 feet underwater. It lost contact with its mother ship around 1 ½ hours into its descent, and it was likely thousands of feet beneath the surface when its hull collapsed.

Before the Titan's final dive, Rush was repeatedly cautioned by submersible experts about the experimental nature of his vessel. But he pushed back against their warnings, citing his desire to innovate and belief that industry safety standards were too strict.

Rush believed his vessel was sound enough to run tours to the Titanic reliably, and he told a friend in 2018 that he would shut OceanGate down before operating an unsafe vessel.

OceanGate did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.